Transcript Revolutionary Rhetorics

DECLARATIONS IN DIALOGUE
Susan Jarratt
Comparative Literature
“Humans” together: forging political bonds
• When? The Enlightenment (also called the Age of Reason): 17th and 18th
centuries, with a reach into the 19 th century and beyond (“modernity”)
• From the authority of religion to secularism (Goethe’s Faust)
• From religious explanations of natural events to the invention of science
• The rejection of monarchy in favor of rule by citizens
• Where? Europe and its colonies (America, Saint Domingue/Haiti)
• How? Through rhetorical analysis of political discourse
• New conditions for speaking and writing: a republic of letters
A REVOLUTIONARY ERA
•
In both Faust and “Betrothal” – violent consequences of acting on Enlightenment ideas
•
Kleist: “this overturning of all human and divine order . . . “ (242)
•
From bourgeois family drama to political texts of the revolutionary era: how does the
question about “bonds” change?
•
Modes of analysis: rhetorically informed literary analysis [Society is transformed by
literature] – the answer to the question about human and others is found in stories
•
Rhetorical analysis of another set of genres: political, instrumental, but also “literary” –
Is there a story in a political text? Can we find irony, contradiction, indirection, multiple
voices? Can political texts be comedies, tragedies, satires?
“WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT, THAT ALL MEN ARE
CREATED EQUAL . . .” – What do you think?
•A. The United States in the 21 st century has realized the promise made in the Declaration of
Independence.
•B. We’ve done a pretty good job, but we have a way to go.
•C. I disagree with the statement.
•D. It’s not the responsibility of the government to assure that these rights are fully realized
for every citizen.
•E. Another opinion
INTERTEXTS
•
Declaration of Independence (1776)
•
Letters of Abigail Adams to John Adams (1771-76)
•
Haitian Constitution (1801), also a letter from Toussaint L’Ouverture to
Napoleon Bonaparte
• “Declaration of Sentiments” (1848), Elizabeth Cady Stanton, et al. Seneca Falls Convention on the Rights of Women
• Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life Frederick Douglass, An American
Slave. Written by Himself (1845)
• Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” (1852
speech)
MORE DECLARATIONS
•
CALIFORNIA CONSTITUTION (ratified
1879)
•
ARTICLE 1 DECLARATION OF
RIGHTS SECTION 1. All people are by
nature free and independent and have
inalienable rights. Among these are
enjoying and defending life and liberty,
acquiring, possessing, and protecting
property, and pursuing and obtaining
safety, happiness, and privacy.
CALIFORNIA CONSTITUTION
ARTICLE 1 DECLARATION OF
RIGHTS SEC. 2. (a) Every person may
freely speak, write and publish his or
her sentiments on all subjects, being
responsible for the abuse of this right.
A law may not restrain or abridge
liberty of speech or press.
Declaration of the Occupation of New
York City, 29 September 2011
As we gather together in solidarity to express
a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose
sight of what brought us together. We write so
that all people who feel wronged by the
corporate forces of the world can know that
we are your allies.
As one people, united, we acknowledge the
reality: that the future of the human race
requires the cooperation of its members; that
our system must protect our rights, and upon
corruption of that system, it is up to the
individuals to protect their own rights, and
those of their neighbors; that a democratic
government derives its just power from the
people, but corporations do not seek consent
to extract wealth from the people and the
Earth; and that no true democracy is
attainable when the process is determined by
economic power.
RHETORIC: SOME DEFINITIONS
• Language in action; doing things with words; a mode
of analysis that brings forward the performative nature
of texts
KEY WORDS
• rhetoric, representation, ethos
• public sphere
• intertext
• genre
FROM “Questions for rhetorical analysis” (HANDBOOK CH. 12)
•
Who speaks (writes, performs, etc.)?
•
For or on behalf of whom? i.e., does the speaker purport to represent a group? What are
the difficulties entailed in “speaking for” a group? Does this rhetorical text allow for
multiple voices?
•
What genre (type) of product is it? Letter, speech, manifesto, editorial, essay,
dialogue, debate, etc.? Are the features of this genre well established? Does this text
strain or violate them? Play with or parody them?
•
What do you know about delivery and/or circulation of this rhetorical act? Through what
media (print, oral presentation) does it come to life?
ETHOS
•From Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric (4th century, BCE)
•One of the ways an orator will produce conviction in his audience: he should appear to be a
person of good sense, virtue, and good will (II.1.4-7).
•In the text or in the person?
•How do we assess the ethos of a collective author? How well does the text represent the
constituents of the group? Inclusion/exclusion? An accurate portrait? An effective
representation of the group’s interests?
WHERE DID THE DECLARATION COME
FROM?
Enlightenment background—four interwoven strands of influence
18THC POLITICS:
--rejection of the divine right of
kings
--regime change through popular
movements and violent
protest: revolution
--from relation of monarch/subject
to nations of sovereign
selves/citizens
Louis XVI, King of France
• 1754-1793: Ancien regime
• Absence of rule of law:
lettres de cachet
• beheaded during the Reign
of Terror, 1793
POLITICAL THEORY
John Locke, English philosopher (1632-1704)
Two Treatises of Government
Social contract theory
--an agreement by the governed (rational individuals) on a set of rules
by which they are governed
--civil rights based on the contract
--violation demands renegotiation or legitimates rebellion
AN 18TH-CENTURY REPUBLIC OF LETTERS
• Immanuel Kant, German philosopher (1724-1804): “The public use
of a man’s reason must be free at all times . . . [by this I mean] the
use which a scholar makes of it before the entire reading public”
(134).
• A bourgeois public sphere: spaces where people read, discussed,
and wrote about opinions, issues, and ideas
• “Spheres” are actual spaces (salons, pubs, coffee houses,
academies, debating societies), textual spaces (newspapers, books,
journals, pamphlets, cartoons, broadsides), and imagined spaces:
Voltaire, French
polemicist (16941778)
• Polemics -- wars of words; attacking
through language
• Defender of civil liberty and freedom of
religion; opposed censorship,
• Attacked abuses of royalty and clergy
who perpetrated superstition and
intolerance
• Wrote 20,000 letters; 2,000 books and
pamphlets
ANCIET CHARLES GABRIEL
•
Anciet Charles Gabriel Lemonnier (French, 1743-1824): Madame Geoffrin's
LEMONNIER (FRENCH, 1743-1824):
canvas,
Château
de Malmaison,
MADAME
GEOFFRIN'S
SALON
IN 1755, Rueil-Malmaison, France. Painted 1812.
OIL ON CANVAS, CHÂTEAU DE
MALMAISON, RUEIL-MALMAISON,
salon in 1755, oil on
18THC ECONOMY: VAST
INCOME GAPS, TAXATION,
COLONIAL EXPLOITATION,
SLAVERY
• British colonies in America (see
Declaration)
• Suffering peasantry in France -
• Saint-Domingue (Haiti), valuable
French colony - plantations
worked by African slaves
(Toussaint L’Ouverture, 1743-1803, leader of slave
revolt in Haiti)
Historical Contexts – american colonies
• Levying of taxes on the colonies by the parliament to cover expenses from
the French and Indian War (Sugar Act, 1764: Stamp Act, 1765; Tea Act,
1773)
• Occupation of Boston by British troops; Boston Massacre, 1770
• Coercive Acts punish Massachusetts for the Boston Tea Party, 1774
• First Continental Congress, September 1774; petitions to parliament and the
king; boycott
• Armed resistance to British troops: April 1775
What is a
“declaration”
anyway?
THE Declaration
of Independence?
Words as stones?
“Words are the
building stones of
systems” (Goethe’s
Faust, 11. 1990-2000,
p. 155)
WHAT DID THE DECLARATION DO?
• Unified the 13 colonies: “The Unanimous
Declaration . . .”
• Put the language of natural rights into circulation:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident . . . “
• Performatively brought a nation into being –“We,
therefore, . . . do . . . publish and declare . . . “
Related genres
• Locke, Two Treatises of
Government
• depositio apologia: deposing
British monarchs -- 7 previous
occasions from 1327-1689; a
public “apology”
(rationale) for dethroning a
“tyrannical” monarch (Lucas 152)
• Jefferson’s constitution of Virginia
•Petitions of various colonies and of
the First Continental Congress:
“humble terms”
•Thomas Paine’s Common Sense,
a pamphlet advocating colonial
independence and republican
government, January 1776
Declarations
•England: Glorious Revolution, 1688-89:
Declaration of Rights -- parliament indicts
James II
•Declaration of war
•“the very existence [of a declaration]
signaled a breakdown in the standard
operations of government” (Lucas 150)
Writing task, process
•Second Continental Congress:
Committee of Five -- a collaborative
assignment
•Jefferson charged with drafting
•17 days from assignment to
adoption
OUR QUESTION FOR
ANALYSIS:
WHO SPEAKS? From
drafts to final version
ETHOS IN THE DRAFTS OF THE DECLARATION
•
A Declaration (1)
•
The unanimous Declaration
•
. . . for a People to advance from that
Subordination . . . (1)
•
. . . for one people to dissolve the
political bands which have connected
them with another
•
“the merciless Indian Savages . . .” (6)
•
“the merciless Indian Savages . . .”
•
“He has incited treasonable
insurrections of our fellow-citizens . . .”
(6)
•
“He has excited domestic insurrection
among us . . .
•
“He has constrained our fellow citizens
taken Captive on the high Seas . . .”
•
“He has constrained others . . .”
[impressment of seamen] (6)
From “subject” to “citizen”
FROM DRAFT TO REVISION: REJECTED PARAGRAPHS (6-7)
• “He has waged cruel War against human Nature itself, violating its most
sacred Rights of Life and Liberty in the Persons of a distant People who never
offended him, captivating and carrying them into Slavery in another Hemisphere,
or to incur miserable Death, in their Transportation thither. This piratical Warfare,
the opprobrium of infidel Powers, is the Warfare of the Christian King of Great
Britain.
• “He has prostituted his Negative for Suppressing every legislative Attempt to
prohibit or to restrain an execrable Commerce, determined to keep open a
Market where Men should be bought and sold, and that this assemblage of
Horrors might want no Fact of distinguished Die.
• “He is now exciting those very People to rise in Arms among us, and to
purchase their Liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the People
upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off, former Crimes committed
against the Liberties of one People, with Crimes which he urges them to commit
against the Lives of another.”
JEFFERSON, SLAVE HOLDER
“These are not just biographical questions;
they are national ones.”
•
“ . . . slavery was so widely accepted
that contradictions between the
evolving ideals and the brutish
reality of enslavement were
overlooked or tolerated”
“Life, Liberty, and the Fact of Slavery”
Edward Rothstein (New York Times, 26
January 2012)
AFFILIATION, IDENTIFICATION
•
Our British brethren (7)
•
Our British brethren (7)
•
the ties of our common kindred (8)
•
the ties of our common kindred
•
consanguinity
•
consanguinity
•
Soldiers of our own blood . . . These
facts have given the last stage to
agonizing affections
•
We must endeavor to forget our former
love for them
•
. . . To hold them as we hold the rest
of mankind enemies in war, in peace
friends.
•
. . . To hold them as we hold the rest
of mankind enemies in war, in peace
friends.
CONCLUSIONS
•
Ethos: Through revision, a citizen-subject came into being.
•
The Declaration as an Enlightenment text: The Declaration attempts to give voice to
a new political subject: the citizen capable of uniting with others in a nation for the
purpose of realizing the Enlightenment ideals of equal rights, liberty, and happiness.
It failed to realize this goal fully by excluding specific categories of “man”: enslaved
people and Indians among others.
•
Genre, intertextuality: Although the Declaration drew on existing documents, ideas,
and language, it has an inaugural power derived from its genre (declaration), its
revolutionary force, and its success at putting into circulation Enlightenment ideas.
CIRCULATION